dave astels

I’ve been preaching for a few years about how you should not maintain a 1-1 correspondence between TestCase and tested Class. David Chelimsky just blogged one of his experience in that regard, in a way that makes the case clearly and concisely.

Yesterday I flew back to my client site outside Chicago. En route I needed to get a new TN-1 visa so I made sure to get a lengthy stop in Toronto to do so.

So for the stick… while the border officers were pleasant and down to business, there weren’t nearly enough of them on duty to efficiently handle the amount of people going through the system. A simple 10 minute job (my TN-1) took far too long to make it through the queue. Once it did it was processed efficiently. In fact, I had to wait so long that I ended up missing my connection, albeit only by about 15 minutes.

Now for the carrot… I went to the gate from which my flight had oh so recently departed and explained the situation to the Air Canada agents still there. They promptly printed me a boarding card for the next flight to Chicago. I had almost an hour before it boarded so I was able to grab a quick lunch. Everything worked out for the best after all. I am most impressed with how Air Canada handled the situation… immediately and with a smile. My checked bag even made it to Chicago with me.

After SD West, Nancy & I spent Saturday on the VTA and CalTrain and in San Francisco.

So what does she do on her first visit to the city? Well, we head up 4th Street from the CalTrian station, stop for a latte at Whole Foods, then proceed directly to The Apple Store at 4th & Market. After leisurely browsing & buying a couple things we head down (um.. up.. over… toward the Bay Bridge) Market Street… and discover a CompUSA. Now Nancy has heard tales a-plenty of CompUSA from my time last year in the Detroit area where my hotel was practically across a parking lot from a CompUSA. So we spent another many minutes wandering about in geeked out bliss. Keep in mind that FutureShop (something akin to Circuit City) is the most technically immersive experience in our area.

That over with we proceeded to have fun wandering through Chinatown, and up the hill to a stunning view of the Bay. We stopped at The Stinking Rose for dinner on the way. Then downtown again to catch the 8:00 train back to Santa Clara.

Early last week (at SDWest) I ran into Gregor Hohpe. I know Gregor from my days at ThoughtWorks. Anyway, some time ago, Gregor moved to Google. Anyway… back to the point. Gregor asked whether I’d like to give a talk at Google. I, of course, jumped at the opportunity.

Friday after his morning talk, we piled into Gregor’s car and drove up the 101 to Mountain View & the Google campus. I gave my “BDD in Ruby with rSpec” talk (to appear on Google Video soon). The crowd was large and very receptive.

We had a great time. Google is truly an awesome place. Nothing I had previously heard did it justice, or prepared me for the magnitude of it.

No… don’t bother asking… I can’t say anything more.

I’m in Allen Holub’s talk this morning… “Everything you know is wrong: Inheritance and getters/setters are evil”.

I was excited to see this talk on the roster. Not only is it a topic I’ve harped on and have always been in agreement with Allen, but I have a similar talk submitted to SDBP this fall.

Allen started off with the classic “tell, don’t ask” talk. He makes on very good point that hadn’t occurred to me before. To really get benefit out of an Agile process (specifically XP) you NEED to be doing OO properly. If you aren’t, you will fail.

Quite a bit of time was spent discussing the problems with implementation inheritance and the advantages of interface inheritance and composition.

Next Allen moved to why encapsulation is so important and why getters & setters are such a problem. Don’t bother getting flustered about that idea.. he’s 100% on the money. If you disagree you need to learn what OO is.

One nice soundbite: “Doing it this way (interface based, using design patterns) lets me have to think less. Thinking is hard… I’d rather just program.”

The bottom line(s):

• There is no such thing as perfect
• Design is a series of trade-offs
• assess risk, then make reasonable decisions
• there’s often is a better way of doing things than the first way you think of

We’re in the AJAX & REST Patterns class now… cool stuff.

Very cool stuff. This makes web app development interesting. Add in Rails and we’re on track.

We just got to this morning’s AJAX talk in time… however not in time to be able to fit into the room.

Nice.

There’s a two parter all this afternoon that we are hoping to get into.

We went to the Jolt Awards Ceremony tonight. The Dr. Dobbs Excellence in Programming Award was awarded to Bruce Schneier (Mr. Cryptography).

The Jolt Awards themselves had high points and low points. On the high side, I’m overjoyed that “Agile Web Development with Rails” won the Jolt for Technical Book.. a rare and dignified honor indeed ;) Congrats guys! Not only that, but Rails won the Jolt in the Web Development Tool category. Kudos to DHH and 37 Signals.

Another high point was that Clover by Cenqua won a Productivity Award in the Testing Tool category.. Way to go, guys! Great folks, great company, great tools. I had the pleasure of meeting in person & chatting with Peter & Brandon tonight after the awards.

The low side, Microsoft won several Jolts for Database Engine (SQL Server 2005), Development Environment (Visual Studio Team System 2005), and Libraries, Frameworks, and Components (.NET Framework 2.0). To add insult to injury Visual Studio was awarded this year’s Hall of Fame entry. I hope this doesn’t mean that the SD Conferences are becoming M$-suckupathons.

One more thing.. for those that don’t know yet… Dr. Dobbs is absorbing SD Magazine. A New & Improved Dr. Dobbs will be on the stands soon.

I did my Intro to jUnit4 talk this morning. It went well with good discussion and a couple dozen people.

If you’re using Java 5 go get jUnit 4.. it’s cool.

I spent the first half of this morning listening to Alistair speaking about Agile Software Development and the Cooperative Game. Very interesting.. and my first time hearing Alistair speak.. a true showman.. it was very enjoyable.